FOURTH PLACE
laton carter
three prose poems
JELLYFISH
Despite no heart and no brain, I adjust. My presence blooms in bottom waters and tides, in league with change. You’ve narrowed the brackets you live in. Arbitrary constructs fill your rooms, the intelligence of the dominant. I can’t escape. But that was never the point. Avoidance is a gift I live without. Embrace the change of the living world and you become its change. Though what change to manifest, and with such power, is a lonely riddle.
SALAMANDER
The world was once submerged by water, life on its fringe cautiously heaving itself onto a loamy first berm. It made little sense. Why abandon certainty for oxygen that required a different way to breathe?
Now I live in darkness, not so much underground as unnoticed. To be noticed into existence doesn’t mean the unnoticed aren’t living. It’s living in parenthesis, encapsuled and theoretical until the lid of my world is pried back. To uncover is to make apocalypse, the forced revelation of light.
STURGEON
Underslung and vacuum-like, the tubular mouth is preceded by four dangling barbels: whiskers dredging the riverbed for larvae and snails. With little room for memory or anticipation, its body will only grow, the scutes and notochord outdated evolutionary advances. Seeing fit not to perfect the world, its imperfection is its sustenance. Time would slow, would seem to slow. In the century-and-a-half-old body of the very oldest, the same promise, there for fry or anyone: wait, linger, watch.
Laton Carter's writing appears in The Boiler, Necessary Fiction, and New
Flash Fiction Review. Carter is the author of Leaving (University of Chicago Press), which received the Oregon Book Award.
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